Saturday, January 30, 2010

A Second Heavy Snow Here

Just before dawn today a second snowstorm settled in here, and, lightly now in the evening, it is still in progress.

We prepared for this one better than the first one, which happened about five weeks ago, but we still didn't think it would be as major as the pre-Christas one, but it looks to be every bit as bad, and could be even worse, because the forecast for the next few days is steadily on the frigid side.

And usuallyduring our snows in this part of Virginia, the temp stays at or near 32F, but all day today it hung at about 20.

My wife doesn't believe in moving a car up close to the road so as to make it easier to get out once the road is plowed. So for this storm I gave in to her and left them in place near the house. But during the night I changed my mind. Unfortunately, however, I had taken a med called legatrin, because I had done a lot of hard work scrounging firewood for my workshop and there was a good chance that that would cause severe cramps in one or both of my legs at night, and legatrin helps prevent that. But it is also a great sleeping pill, or at least for me it is, and so I woke up once or twice and thought about the snow and the cars but promptly fell asleep again and I didn't get serious about getting up and about till 6, when it was too late. There were already two or three inches of snow on the ground, and our driveway is largely uphill, and neither my wife's Saturn or my Isuzu pickup cared to make it, and I gave up.

So here we are, essentially nailed in for several days to come with wind chills at close to zero F forecase for every morning, But we have plenty of firewood, food, water, and the other essentials, and we have only to worry about suddenly getting seriously ill and having to be taken out of here by helicopter or whatever, which doesn't seem likely -- we haven't any warnings of such.

So, while we were getting more firewood out of the pile that we cut and stacked so conscientiously this past fall, I was looking at all the picturesqueness of our buildings and the trees, and I got to thinking that this kind of scene is exactly one of the main reasons why i wanted to move here.

Footnote: The next morning, on the 31st, the temp not long after dawn had dropped to an even zero degrees fahrenheit! That;s 17 degrees below zero and the temp when water similarly starts turning into ice over in Europe, for those celsius people.